HOLA,
HELLO,
HALLO.

I’m a photographer who doesn’t stop at the photograph. I design what goes around it, organise everything it takes, and find the place where people actually see it. Sometimes that’s a gallery or a website, most days it’s an Instagram feed, once it was a snack machine.

BASED: BERLIN
PRACTICE: PHOTOGRAPHY /
DESIGN / ART DIRECTION
EDUCATION: B.A. PHOTOGRAPHY
LANGUAGES: ES / EN / DE
IN SHORT: CREATIVE GENERALIST

PHOTOGRAPHY: COMMISSIONED AND PERSONAL WORK
EXHIBITIONS: TWO SHOWS, ONE NIGHT EACH
DESIGN STUDIO: 3CK, CO-FOUNDED, LAUNCHING SOON
ON ROTATION: THIS WEEK’S RECORDS

Polaroid self-portrait of Thomas Plagmann, black and white — SELF-PORTRAIT. POLAROID.

01 / 05PORTRAITURE — EDITORIAL — EVENTS — DOCUMENTARY

PHOTOGRAPHY

Photography is the core of what I do, and where most of my projects start. For clients, that means editorials, portraits for artists, and events and venues: work where one image has to hold up on a feed, on a poster and on a printed page.

For myself, it means slower projects shaped by personal narratives and subtle visual gestures: the people close to me, the places I come from, and what happens to a photograph after it leaves the camera, as a print, a Polaroid or mixed media. I shoot analog and digital, and in both I aim for clarity and restraint.

Commissioned portrait: Robert — ROBERT. COMMISSIONED.01

Commissioned portrait: AKRIILA — AKRIILA. COMMISSIONED.02

Personal portrait: Juliette — JULIETTE. PERSONAL.03

Personal work: Chile — CHILE. PERSONAL.05

Commissioned work: Dia’z — DIA’Z. COMMISSIONED.04

Commissioned work: Honey Lou — HONEY LOU. COMMISSIONED.06

HOW THE WORK GETS OUT — PLANNING / PLATFORM / LAUNCH

I plan before I post. Every piece of content lives on a Figma board first, with its image, caption and status, so I know what goes out, when, and why. Bigger launches get the same treatment: my website was designed in Figma, built in Webflow and announced as a five-part photo series instead of a single post.

Figma board planning Instagram posts with images, captions and status — PROCESS — FIGMA — IG CONTENT BOARD07

Instagram post announcing the website launch, first of five — LAUNCH — WEBSITE, 1 OF 5 POSTS08

ALL WORK →
THOMASPLAGMANN.COM

02 / 05CONCEPT — CURATION — PROJECT MANAGEMENT — DESIGN

“IN-BETWEEN GREETINGS”

300/300POSTCARDS TAKEN IN ONE NIGHT

Six photographers, two postcard stands, one night at Honey Lou. I developed the concept with Kieran Loftus: no walls and no frames, just images in rotating stands that visitors were invited to take home. None of the photographs can be traced to a specific place, but together they built one that existed for a single night. You recognise these places not because you’ve been there, but because you could have been.

The exhibition ended when the last card was gone. Three months of emails, group chats and the occasional 3 a.m. messages went into it... afterwards the cards kept turning up, framed, in apartments across Berlin.

FORMAT: A COLLECTIVE TEMPORARY EXPERIENCE
DATE: 04.02.2026
VENUE: HONEY LOU, BERLIN
EDITION: 300 POSTCARDS, A5 FORMAT
VISITORS: ~110
ROLE: CONCEPT, CURATION, PROJECT MANAGEMENT, DESIGN, PHOTOGRAPHY

Exhibition poster, Instagram announcement — POSTER — INSTAGRAM ANNOUNCEMENT01

Exhibition text, Instagram announcement — EXHIBITION TEXT — INSTAGRAM ANNOUNCEMENT02

THE NIGHTVIDEO

The two rotating postcard stands — STANDS04

Instagram story from the night by @martinhussain — NIGHT — STORY BY @MARTINHUSSAIN06

3D SCAN — SCREEN RECORDINGVIDEO

HANDS AT THE STANDVIDEO

A postcard from the exhibition framed on someone’s wall — AFTERLIFE — ON SOMEONE’S WALL08

Figma board for In-Between Greetings — PROCESS — FIGMA — IN-BETWEEN GREETINGS09

Thank-you postcard, Instagram recap — THANK-YOU POSTCARD — INSTAGRAM RECAP10

A postcard stand on the metro — LOGISTICS — ONE STAND, ONE METRO RIDE11

“UNTITLED”

20/20PRINTS SOLD FROM A SNACK MACHINE IN ONE NIGHT

No opening, no white cube, no gallery. I pitched Kieran Loftus the idea of showing his photographs in an automated Späti in Friedrichshain: twenty framed prints between the Haribo and the Sour Patch Kids, €10 each, paid at the machine. Buying one took the same gesture as buying gum, and which print came out was left to chance.

The idea was to swap the logic of the art market for the logic of a vending machine, and to ask whether a photograph’s value comes from what it shows or where it’s found. Around fifty people came. The exhibition ended when the machine was empty.

FORMAT: SPÄTI INTERVENTION
DATE: 02.10.2025
VENUE: E-KIOSK, GÄRTNERSTRASSE
EDITION: 20 PRINTS, 10×15, FRAMED
PHOTOGRAPHS: KIERAN LOFTUS
ROLE: CONCEPT, CURATION, PROJECT MANAGEMENT

A PRINT LEAVING THE MACHINE — DOCUMENTATIONVIDEO

CCTV still of attendees during the evening — ATTENDEES DURING THE EVENING — CCTV02

Framed prints inside the vending machine — PRINTS IN THE MACHINE03

The kiosk web app used to buy a print — HOW PEOPLE BOUGHT A PRINT — KIOSK WEB APP04

The 20 selected prints — THE 20 SELECTED PRINTS05

03 / 05ART DIRECTION — IDENTITY — SYSTEMS — CONTENT

3CK is the design and communication studio I co-founded with Rastko Obradovic in Berlin. The name is short for Dreieck, German for triangle. We work across three planes: concept, screen and space, and treat branding, digital and environment as one system, for design‑driven brands, artists, architecture studios and cultural organisations. At its centre is the 3CK Archive, a running record of the architecture, products and graphics we look at, and the starting point for everything we make.

Everything in it is blue. Blue is never a material, only scattered light: a relation rather than content. That one constraint holds together objects that have nothing else in common, a stamp from Munich 1972, an iMac G3, a brutalist interior. It isn’t decoration, it’s the argument.

We’re launching soon. What you see here is the studio while it’s being built: the identity, the website, the systems behind it and our current project.

STUDIO: DESIGN AND COMMUNICATION, BERLIN
CO-FOUNDERS: THOMAS PLAGMANN, RASTKO OBRADOVIC
PLANES: CONCEPT / SCREEN / SPACE
CONSTRAINT: BLUE
ROLE: ART DIRECTION, PHOTOGRAPHY, DESIGN, PROJECT MANAGEMENT
STATUS: IN DEVELOPMENT, LAUNCHING SOON

The 3CK website opening on the archive grid — WEBSITE — ARCHIVE, IN DEVELOPMENT02

The website opens on the archive itself. Every tile is one object, and the grid fills with each new entry, so the first thing you see is what we look at.

An archive entry on the 3CK website: a 1986 Kieler Woche poster with maker, text, category and year — WEBSITE — ARCHIVE ENTRY, CMS03

Every object is one entry with the same fields: who made it, a short text on why it matters, a category and a year. The grid is built from those entries, so the archive grows without a page being redesigned, and a 1986 sailing poster and a pair of headphones read as one collection.

3CK business cards, printed and scanned — BRAND IDENTITY — BUSINESS CARDS, PRINTED, SCANNED.01

HOW IT RUNS — THE 3CK ARCHIVE

Behind the archive runs a system we built ourselves: Airtable holds every entry, a script runs every night, and AI classification sorts new images by category before anything goes out, daily on Instagram and monthly as volumes on the website. This is its third iteration. The first was manual, the second automated parts of it without a classification logic.

Airtable database holding the archive entries — PROCESS — AIRTABLE — ARCHIVE DATABASE04

Apps Script that runs every night — PROCESS — APPS SCRIPT — RUNS NIGHTLY05

HOW A PROJECT GETS BUILT

Our first project is about dithering: the trick early handheld consoles used to fake tones their screens couldn’t show, until better screens made it disappear. Our own collection of consoles isn’t the subject, it’s the evidence, photographed in three groups: the ones that needed dithering, the ones that made it optional, and the ones that ended it.

One Figma board holds the research, the concept and the shot list. From a single shoot we plan every format: a long‑form essay, a behind‑the‑scenes reel, posts, and a printed sticker pack of the consoles, dithered.

Figma board with research, concept and shot list for the dithering project — PROCESS — FIGMA — PROJECT OVERVIEW06

Premiere Pro timeline of the 9:16 behind-the-scenes reel — PROCESS — PREMIERE — BEHIND-THE-SCENES REEL, 9:1607

04 / 05LISTENING — WEEK 43, 2026

ON ROTATION

Music has always been around whatever I’m making: on set, in the edit, on the way home from a shoot. It sets the pace of a sequence as much as any visual reference does. This is what I’ve had on repeat this week.